Currently my main research project is the
ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS)
experiment. ATLAS detector is 44 metres long and 25 metres in diameter, weighing about 7,000 tonnes.
It is one of thw two general purpose detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the European
Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland.
When two 7 TeV proton beams colide at the LHC, its unprecedented energy
and extremely high rate of collisions produce some rare phenomena that involve highly massive particles
which were not observable using earlier generations of the accelerators. With the powerful
ATLAS and CMS detector at CERN, finally we will be able to shed on the Higgs bosen, the final missing piece of
the Standard Model that allows the other fundamental particles to aquire masses, as well as the
new theories of particle physics beyond the Standard Model.

I am also involved in the
BaBar experiment that is located at the
SLAC National Accelerator Center,
near Stanford University, in California.
At the beginning of the Universe, the big-bang theory predicts
the creation of
an equal amount of particles and anti-particles. But in everyday life we do
not encounter anti-particles. The question, therefore, is
"What has happened to the anti-particles?"
The primary motivation of the BaBar experiment is to study the violation
of charge and parity (CP) symmetry. This violation
manifests
itself as different behavior between particles and anti-particles and
is the first step to explain the absence of anti-particles in everyday life.
To achieve this goal, the BaBar experiment exploits the 9.1 GeV electron beam
and the 3 GeV positron beam of the PEP-II accelerator. The two beams collide
in the center of the experiment, producing Y(4S)
mesons that decay into equal numbers of B and anti-B mesons and allows
us to perform precise measurement of CP violation effect using B meson decays.

In 2008, half of the
Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to
Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa for their theory which simultaneously
explained the source of matter/antimatter asymmetries in particle interactions
and predicted the existence of the third generation of fundamental particles.
The BaBar experiment together with the Belle experiment at KEK in Japan,
recently provided experimental confirmation of the theory, some thirty years
after it was published, through precision measurements of matter/antimatter
asymmetries.
For detail, please see articles at
Babar statement
SLAC Today
Nature
ScienceSymmetry Magazine.

While at BaBar, I had served as the on-site
system coordinator for the
Silicon Vertex Tracker.
My main physics analysis focus at BaBar
is in the area of CP violation in B meson decays, primarily connected with
the measurement of the CKM angle beta. I also initiated and carried out
analyses to search for the new physics beyond the Standard Model (SM)
using charm meson decays.

For more information of the high energy physics research program at
Iowa State University, please check our
HEP webpage.